Wednesday, July 31, 2013

The damage Stephen Harper has done to his country is everywhere. Three years ago, at the G20 Summit, he touted Canada's economic growth. But now that he has implemented his austerity agenda, things aren't looking so good. The Canadian Press reports that Canada is no longer the fastest growing economy among the G7 countries:

Capital Economics says Canada's economy will only grow by 1.5 per
cent this year, and slow further to one per cent in 2014 as the
country's over-built housing market comes crashing to earth.

That would mean the U.S., Germany and likely Japan could outperform Canada in growth in one or both years.

Canada
generally outperformed the Group of Seven industrialized economies
during the 2008-09 recession and in the aftermath, but has seen the
actual growth rate slow each year of the recovery period from 3.4 per
cent in 2010, to 2.5 per cent in 2012, to 1.7 per cent last year.

We tend to forget that, besides tanking the Canadian economy, Harper has also had a hand in tanking the world economy. Linda McQuaig writes, in The Toronto Star, that the prime minister pushed for austerity at the G20 summit in 2010:

The embrace of austerity at the 2010 Toronto summit was a dramatic
reversal of the stimulus spending that the world’s rich nations had
quite effectively adopted to counter the devastating 2008 financial
crash — in line with the lessons taught by the great 20th century
British economist John Maynard Keynes.

(Ironically, the high
unemployment produced by austerity reduces tax revenues and increases
social spending, making deficit-reduction difficult. Much to its
embarrassment, the Harper government has had to revise its deficit
estimates upward. So far this year, Canada’s deficit is rising, not
falling.)

But the fixation on
deficits, which has dominated public discourse for much of the last 30
years, has helped divert attention from the fact that austerity is part
of a larger agenda (including tax cuts and privatization) that’s
redistributed money toward the top.

We don't consider Harper to be a player on the world stage. As George W. Bush liked to say, we have "misunderestimated" him. He is the king of austerity.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

As each month comes to an end, we wait with baited breath to discover how many new jobs were created in the last thirty days. But Yogendra Shakya and Axelle Janczur write that the kind of jobs we create is just as -- if not more -- important than the number of jobs we create:

In the name of “free
market” policies, Canada has seen a downward push on wages and a rise in
unstable, temporary and unsafe jobs. These types of jobs are broadly
referred to as “precarious work” or “non-standard employment” since they
are marked by limited or no stability, benefits and protection.

Several studies have
documented that precarious, non-standard jobs are rapidly growing in
Canada, and that this trend negatively affects a substantial proportion
of Canadians.

The Harper government is focused on establishing a neo-feudal relationship between employer and worker. And, to a very large extent, it is succeeding:

A recently released report by United Way Toronto and McMaster University, It’s More Than Poverty,
found that 40 per cent of workers in the Greater Toronto Area-Hamilton
region are in precarious types of employment. The Law Commission of
Ontario’s recent report, Vulnerable Workers and Precarious Work,
has documented how lax employment standards and occupational health and
safety regulations are making an increasing number of workers more
vulnerable to bad working conditions and exploitation. Research also
shows that immigrants, racialized people (“visible minorities”) and
women tend to be overrepresented in these types of jobs.

The research has also shown that precarious work is unhealthy work:

Research findings about health impacts from precarious jobs are
particularly concerning. Health impacts included immediate ailments such
as debilitating workplace injuries as well as chronic concerns like
ulcers, chronic pain, depression, diabetes, high blood pressure and
heart disease. Most did not have extended health and dental coverage or
sick leave benefits. Study participants also mentioned that they often
delay or forgo seeking health care because of having to juggle multiple
jobs just to make ends meet.

And, as the government encourages unhealthy work, it cuts back on health care spending. What should be done?

The solutions and policy tools are at hand. In some cases, it is about
more effective implementation or broadening existing policies (better
enforcement of the Employment Standards Act and the Occupational Health
and Safety Act, specifically in sectors that rely heavily on “temp”
jobs; expanding pay equity legislation; strengthening federal employment
equity and adopting this at provincial levels; integrating robust
anti-discrimination legislation in workplaces).

But the present government is adamantly opposed to using such policy tools. The only way to change policy is to change the government.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Frank Graves has been tracking public opinion for a long time. In his most recent survey, he asked Canadians four broad questions: 1) Do you favour more or less immigration? 2) Should Canada focus on domestic production or international trade? 3) Should we build our economy on carbon based energy or green energy? and 4) Do you favour more or less government?

In only one of these four areas do Canadians appear to support Harper government policy. We are not as welcoming of immigrants as we used to be. But, interestingly, on the question of active or laissez faire government, Canadians and Conservatives are on different sides of the fence. Graves writes:

The results are very interesting and fit in with our trends analysis
which suggests that there is growing skepticism to the notion that a
minimal state and lower taxes would leave the invisible hand of the
market to produce a better economy for all. The invisible hand seems to
be offering a visible middle finger to frustrated citizens who have
tired of these promises of prosperity while their situations have
stagnated or declined. This has not produced an appetite for ‘big’
government but it has produced a clear conviction that the state should
have more – and not less – of a role in designing and delivering a
better future. And once again, it is notable that this consensus does
not appear to be congenial with the core political philosophy of the
government of the day.

What is even more interesting is how closely the numbers track the results of the last election:

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that in our most recent poll,
support for a smaller government almost perfectly reflects support for
the current government. When asked whether they believe a more active
government or a less active government would lead to a better future 25
years from now, just one-quarter of Canadians (26 per cent) put their
faith in a smaller government (this compares to 28 per cent who say they
would vote for the Conservative Party in a future election). By
corollary, 70 per cent would like to see a more active government,
compared to 72 per cent who would vote for another party.

But what is most intriguing of all is the attitude of the next generation to government in general:

One notable finding, which mirrors recent European research, is that the
youngest citizenry are more muted in their support for active
government. The newest cohorts may be the most progressive ever in terms
of social values, but they are more individualistic and less receptive
to the notion that the state can solve their problems. Whether this is a
product of growing up in an era of retrenchment and austerity, which
offers little for them, or something deeper, it merits further
investigation.

It's pretty clear that the Harper government does not represent most Canadians. But it is equally clear that the next generation holds the balance of power. How they respond in the next election will determine Canada's future.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

The evidence keeps piling up. When Hurricane Sandy tore up the Jersey Shore and flooded New York City, Americans started talking about climate change. But when Calgary was inundated last month, Jason Kenny called it a "once in a century event," claiming that everybody cleaned up and went about their business the last time Calgary was flooded, in 1892. When Toronto's subway stations were under water last month, you would think that Stephen Harper -- whose real home town is Toronto -- would have taken note.

Edward Greenspan writes, in the Toronto Star, that the event should have prompted a speech from Harper, which would have sounded something like this:

“Friends, while the
cause of a single extreme weather event is unknowable, their greater
frequency is irrefutable. Federal scientists are right: there is
something fundamental happening out there, and Canada both contributes
to the problem and suffers from the consequences.

“Thus I want to reach
out today to four groups in particular: government scientists, who will
once again be allowed to speak freely; President Obama, who has
reasonably challenged us to craft a Keystone proposal that ‘does not
significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution’; the young
people of Canada, starting with my children Ben and Rachel, who, while
they don’t yet vote, deserve a government obsessed with a better future;
and, finally, the oil industry based in my flood-ravaged hometown to
whom I want to invoke a famously wise Conservative nostrum: ‘Short-term
pain for long-term gain.’

“Friends, our current trajectory is unsustainable. Let’s get on a new one.”

Barack Obama has made the pivot. Bur Harper hasn't, because he's sold his soul to Big Oil. He has pinned his future -- and the country's future -- on black goo.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

One of the Right's favourite shibboleths is that, when government invests directly in people, it encourages sloth. Far better to offer citizens tax credits. Government shouldn't invest, they say. It should cut taxes. But Carol Goar writes in The Toronto Star:

The C.D. Howe Institute, financed primarily by business, has concluded after a thorough analysis of the tax system that Ottawa should switch back to investing in social programs.

Economists Alexandre Laurin and Finn Poschmann
found that the more a working family earned, the more it lost in clawed
back benefits and higher taxes. Low-income families were the hardest
hit. Their marginal effective tax rate — the amount they owed on each
additional dollar — could be as high as up to 60 per cent (80 per cent
in Quebec.)

“There are better
alternatives aimed at supporting low-income families through universal
in-kind programs such as neighbourhood facilities and services aimed at
target communities,” they said.

The Harper government considers that conclusion pure heresy. However, Laurin and Poshmann document how the present tax system encourages sloth:

Last week’s report, Treading Water: The Impact of High Marginal Effective Tax Rates on Working Families in Canada,
went a step further. It followed the poor into the labour market and
found they were penalized for extra effort. The more they earned, the
more benefits they lost. The three big ones were the Canada Child Tax Benefit, which is phased out as a family’s income rises; the GST/HST Credit, which likewise diminishes as income rises; and the Working Income Tax Benefit, which starts to decrease at a family income of $15,509 and falls to zero at $27,489.

To make their numbers
relevant to laymen, Laurin and Poschmann created a hypothetical couple,
Peter and Marie Thompson, with two children living in a rented
apartment. He worked full-time and she worked part-time. Together they
brought in $40,000 — just enough to make ends meet. Marie was
considering a switch to full-time work to earn extra money. But once the
couple weighed the costs and benefits, they realize she’d lose almost
much in benefits as she’d make in income. (Her marginal effective tax
rate was 68 per cent).

Well-off couples are
spared this double whammy. If one of the parents worked longer hours, it
might push the family into a higher tax bracket, but it wouldn’t result
in lost cash benefits because most are targeted at low-income earners.

The Harper government has declared war on the poor. It has reduced Employment Insurance benefits. It has accused recipients of fraud. It has cut health care spending. It has trashed the Kelowna Accord. And it has helped the rich get richer -- claiming that helping the rich get richer will create jobs for the poor.

The evidence is incontrovertible. Their "program" is pure hogwash. If they really wanted to improve the lot of those who are just getting by, they would invest in affordable child care and public transportation. Instead, they offer sermons about laziness and their own righteousness.

Friday, July 26, 2013

Murray Dobbin writes that both men are connected, despite the years. Friedman was famous for coining the phrase "Free To Choose." He sold right wing ideologues on the notion that the free market ensured absolute freedom. His acolytes believed, therefore, that free market capitalism was the cornerstone of democracy.

Except Friedman wasn't really sold on democracy. Dobbin writes:

At a conference on Freedom, Democracy and Economic Welfare in 1986, he
challenged an audience member who had placed democracy at the pinnacle
of human achievement -- not so, said Friedman. "You can't say that
majority voting is a basic right.... That's a proposition I object to
very strenuously." He later wrote: "One of the things that troubles me
very much is that I believe a relatively free economy is a necessary
condition for a democratic society. But I also believe ... that a
democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy."

Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, has documented how Friedman and his colleagues at the University of Chicago prescribed radical therapy for economies they considered weak. They could only accomplish that therapy by taking advantage of -- or by creating their own -- crises in those economies. Ultimately, the rules of democracy had to be suspended for their solutions to work. And, thus, Friedman helped Chile's Augusto Pinochet tackle inflation -- at horrendous human cost.

However, their solutions always resulted in a consumption crisis. Dobbins writes:

But this 30-year history of liberating capital has had exactly the
effect that many predicted: a persistent consumption crisis. Capitalists
cannot sell all the goods and services they are capable of producing.
The crisis has been delayed a number of times -- most notably by the
globalization of production.

But the 2008 meltdown stripped away all the
camouflage from a system that could not prevail. In Canada as well as
in other developed Western nations, the crisis has been delayed by cheap
goods from China and other low-wage countries, and by the liberal use
of credit. But nothing in nature or economies stays the same for long
and these two factors can no longer save extreme capitalism from its
crisis.

What Friedman created was a house of cards. Democracy -- real democracy -- would bring the house down. But, remember, Friedman believed that "a democratic society once established destroys a free economy." And that's where Edward Snowden comes in. We're told that he is destroying the bulwark which has been built to protect us from terrorists. But, according to Dobbin:

The massive invasion of privacy and violation of civil liberties in the
U.S. exposed by whistle-lower Edward Snowden has been justified as the
necessary price Americans have to pay to keep them safe from terrorism.
It is more likely the price Americans -- and perhaps Canadians -- will
be forced to pay as extreme capitalism anticipates future domestic
resistance to its behaviour.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

After the cabinet shuffle last week, commentators began to speculate about whether Stephen Harper was opening the door for his successor. The truth is, no one knows what Harper is planning. He doesn't trust anyone enough to give a hint about what he's really thinking. But we have suffered the man long enough to make judgements based on what the man has done, as opposed to what he has said.

And, therefore, Devon Black writes, it's fair to ask: What legacy will Stephen Harper leave after he goes? You can see signs of what's to come:

Given that we’re already seeing the need to mitigate the effects of
climate change, I suspect that the changing climate may be the next
generation’s greatest challenge – but even if I’m wrong, there’s a good
chance that the greatest challenge will be access to water, or declining
biodiversity, or resource depletion. Whatever other problems will need
solving, they’ll all occur against the backdrop of a damaged
environment.

Despite the harm that climate change is already causing, Canada’s
current record on environmental issues remains abysmal. The government
has instead focused its efforts on raising penalties for criminal
offenders, pursuing dead-on-arrival Senate reforms, and letting
Canadians know how much money they’ve put into the Economic Action Plan.
Spending money and being tough on crime makes for great stump speeches,
but it doesn’t make for a particularly memorable contribution to the
great Canadian project.

Great leaders see what's coming and they move a country into the future. Mr. Harper is steadfastly trying to turn back the clock, even as he stubbornly refuses to admit that the future of the planet lies in the balance. Ironically, the Conservative Party -- that is, the Progressive Conservative Party -- once made the environment a central issue:

The real shame is that protection of the environment used to be an
important part of Conservative policy in Canada. In 2006, Corporate
Knights declared Brian Mulroney the “Greenest PM in Canadian History.”
The award’s wording might have been hyperbolic, but Mulroney’s record on
the environment speaks for itself.

Mulroney hassled U.S. President Ronald Reagan for years on an air
quality agreement to combat acid rain, before finally getting his
successor, President George H. W. Bush, to sign on. Under Mulroney,
Canada was the first industrialized country to ratify both the
Convention on Biodiversity and the Framework Convention on Climate
Change. Mulroney saw the passage of the Canadian Environmental
Assessment Act and the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, and the
creation of the National Round Table of the Environment and Economy
(NRTEE).

Under Harper, Canada’s environmental protection legislation has been
gutted. NRTEE has been shut down, and its research hidden from the
public. Canada has become notorious for not just ignoring, but for
downright impeding the creation of international agreements to protect
the environment.

Stephen Harper has guided the country into a box canyon -- a twenty-first century version of The Little Big Horn. And he is a twenty-first century version of George Armstrong Custer.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Michael Harris writes that the Harper government has a new emblem -- a "two and a half storey hot air balloon floating high in the
parliamentary sky over the Ottawa River: Senator Mike Duffy, clutching a
briefcase stuffed with cash."

Mr. Harper has always claimed that he is a wise steward of the public purse. There is no better emblem to torpedo that myth than the inflated Senator form Kanata. Duffy may eventually take the prime minister down with him. The list of people Duffy has already taken out is growing:

The body count alone – senators Tkachuk, LeBreton and the prime
minister’s chief-of-staff, suggest there is more than a whiff of
blameworthiness, if not illegality, in this matter.

The stench will get a little stronger if Senator Gerstein, one of the
architects of the In-and-Out scandal, is drawn in. Since he was in
charge of the Conservative Party Fund that was initially to be used to
pay off Duffy’s expenses, it is hard to imagine how he will not be.

And, of course, besides Wright there are the other quietly departing residents of the PMO. Those who are left are madly trying to keep the rot from destroying anyone else's career. Whether or not that will happen depends on the RCMP:

So it all boils down to how well an RCMP wracked with internal dissent
and accusations of political interference in its management structures
carries out its investigation. The choice of an investigator is
encouraging. Corporal Greg Horton is one of the best, currently assigned
to Sensitive and International Investigations, responsible for looking
into matters of significant risk to Canada’s political, economic and
social integrity. This file certainly qualifies for that.

If things still work in this country, the Mounties will pop Mr. Harper's balloon.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

For those who view economics as a morality play, Detroit's bankruptcy is another example of an economic sinner in the hands of an angry god. For those who view economics as a Darwinian test of survival, Detroit is just another species that didn't make the cut. The truth is that Detroit illustrates the consequences of the economic policies of the last thirty-five years. For the city -- like the American middle class itself -- has been hollowed out. Consider, Robert Reich writes, the following:

Detroit is a devastatingly poor, mostly black, increasingly abandoned island in
the midst of a sea of comparative affluence that’s mostly white. Its
suburbs are among the richest in the nation. Oakland County, for
example, is the fourth wealthiest county in the United States, of
counties with a million or more residents. Greater Detroit
— which includes the suburbs — is among the nation’s top five financial
centers, the top four centers of high-technology employment, and the
second-biggest source of engineering and architectural talent. Not
everyone is wealthy, to be sure, but the median household in the region
earns close to $50,000 a year, and unemployment is no higher than the
nation’s average. The median household in Birmingham, Michigan, just
across the border that delineates the city of Detroit, earned more than
$94,000 last year; in nearby Bloomfield Hills — still within the Detroit
metropolitan area — the median was more than $150,000.

The
median household income within the city of Detroit is around $26,000,
and unemployment is staggeringly high. One out of 3 residents is in
poverty; more than half of all children in the city are impoverished.
Between 2000 and 2010, Detroit lost a quarter of its population as the
middle-class and whites fled to the suburbs. That left it with depressed
property values, abandoned neighborhoods, empty buildings, lousy
schools, high crime, and a dramatically-shrinking tax base. More than
half of its parks have closed in the last five years. Forty percent of
its streetlights don’t work.

It's true that Detroit failed to adapt to the globalized automobile industry. But, unquestionably, a good deal of the blame for that failure rests with the car companies. They chose bean counters as presidents -- men who were mesmerized by numbers, but who knew nothing of the two most important parts of the automobile industry -- cars and customers.

That said, it is still true that the best way to face a challenge is to pull together. Unfortunately, in the last thirty-five years, Americans have been pulling apart.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Perhaps the public is finally catching on. The Canadian Press reports that a recent Harris-Decima survey -- required under federal advertising rules -- found that:

Slick television ads this year for the Harper government's "economic
action plan" appear to be inspiring a lot of, well, inaction.

A
key measure of the ads' impact is whether viewers check out
actionplan.gc.ca, the web portal created in 2009 to promote the
catch-all brand.

But a survey of 2,003 adult Canadians completed in April identified just three people who actually visited the website.

Perhaps people know that the Economic Action Plan has come to a halt and been replaced by The Deficit Reduction Plan. Or perhaps they know the Economic Action Plan is a baldfaced lie. At any rate, they give Harper and Company less credit than they did before:

Harris-Decima also asked: "How would you rate the overall performance
of the Government of Canada," the same question asked in the other
eight surveys.

Previous results from 2009 to 2012 showed an
average of 43 per cent of respondents rating the government from good to
excellent. The latest survey found only 38 per cent giving a positive
endorsement, a trough hit only once before, in 2010.

It is time for Canadians to face the sad truth. Canada engaged in a
deliberate policy of attempted genocide against First Nations people.
And the starvation experiments were only the first of a litany of
similar such attempts to control, delegitimize and, yes, even annihilate
First Nations to suit the needs of a growing Dominion.

These "nutrition experiments" were carried out in residential schools. It wasn't the first time that science -- or the lack of it -- was used against first nations people. The authors write that in 1907, Dr. Pete Bryce, Canada's first Chief Medical Officer, told his superiors in Ottawa that:

Canada’s aboriginal
people in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan were being “decimated by
tuberculosis and that the federal government possessed the means to stop
it.” Instead, it chose a such minimalist approach that, in the medical
opinion of Dr. Bryce, it “amounted to almost nothing.”

The government of the
day sought to hide Bryce’s findings from the general public and chose to
bury the report and relieve Bryce of his duties. This had the effect of
ensuring that no real steps would be taken to help save the lives of
natives on reserves and in residential schools from the ravages of this
disease. Indeed, Bryce was so frustrated that in the end he charged that
“the government’s treatment of it’s aboriginal peoples amounted to
nothing less than an infuriating and criminal disregard to the country’s
Treaty pledges.”

In Canada, we sweep what is inconvenient or unpleasant under the rug. We can no longer do that. Former prime minister Paul Martin called these nutrition experiments "monstrous." Conditions on Canadian reserves have been monstrous for a long time.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Amid all the talk this week of Stephen Harper's enemies list, a lot of us missed what is surely another example of how corrupt the Harper government has become -- the appointment of Harper's former bodyguard as the Canadian ambassador to Jordan. Gerald Caplan writes that, as ambassador, Bruno Saccomani is also responsible for relations with Iraq. Mr. Soccomani has no background in foreign affairs:

Because Mr. Saccomani, a middle-level Mountie, was in charge of the PM’s
personal security, the government brazenly peddles him as an expert in
security, ready to be an ambassador. What an insult to the intelligence
of Canadians and what a slap in the face to the entire foreign service.
Personal security and international security are two unrelated
universes. Mr. Saccomani seems to have no background in the vast,
intricate world of diplomacy, foreign affairs, the Middle East in
general or Jordan and Iraq in particular.

But expertise is clearly not Mr. Harper's strong suit. As the enemies list illustrates, it's loyalty that counts with Harper:

By any normative standard, [Saccomani] has not a single qualification for the job
except that Stephen Harper trusts him. Or, in Harperlandese, as
articulated by Conservative MP Deepak Obhrai, parliamentary secretary to
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, Saccomani is a “very distinguished
individual with a strong record as a professional public servant.” In
other words, a good bodyguard.

Those who do know something about Foreign Affairs have figured out the real significance of Saccomani's appointment:

As Daniel Livermore, senior fellow in the Graduate School of Public and
International Affairs, University of Ottawa, wrote in the Globe and
Mail, Canada intends to play no role in the fraught Middle East peace
process. “To put the matter bluntly, the government just doesn’t care
enough about the region or its issues to put experienced people in charge.

The rise of Stephen Harper has been all about the rise of the spectacularly incompetent.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Lawrence Martin has admitted that the title for his latest book was inspired by Rick Pearlstein's examination of the Nixon administration. However, Martin writes, Harperland is not Nixonland -- at least not yet:

Harperland is not in a league with Nixonland, certainly not on the
basis of what we know now. But that doesn’t mean that the abuse of power
by this government is not of an extraordinary nature. It doesn’t mean
that there aren’t shadings of character and behaviour that are similar
to Nixon’s.

There’s been a siege mentality at work here that calls to mind those
times. We have a leader who seems incapable of escaping his brooding
resentments and authoritarian urges. Many observers talk of a paranoia
strain in the Harper team which has led to a reliance on the dark arts, a
reliance which, in terms of volume, goes beyond anything we have seen
in Ottawa as far as memory reaches.

Canada, has never been immune to the abuse of power. But, under Harper, Canada and Canadians have been treated with more contempt than ever before:

Not helping the Conservative case was their leader becoming the first
prime minister to be found in contempt of parliament. It was for
refusing to share basic information on program costing with parliament’s
democratically-elected representatives.

Not helping was the prime minister’s instituting of an unprecedented
vetting and censorship system wherein all information is controlled from
the centre. Resultant muzzling stories are extraordinary. The science
community is so distrusted that Harper operatives, in part of what
commentator Allan Gregg sees as an Orwellian obsession, shadows
distinguished scientists with chaperones – media minders as they’re
called – to see they don’t step out of line.

Not helping have been many other developments. Campaigns to discredit
opponents were a staple of the Nixon years and have been, though not to
the same degree, of the Harper years. Targets include, to name just a
few, diplomat Richard Colvin, Veterans’ affairs advocate Sean Bruyea,
Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, and budget officer Kevin Page. Between
elections, the Harper team has brought in character-assassination
advertising, much of it dishonest or out of context, to a degree far
beyond what our politics has seen before.

Our prime minister is a doodle. We've never had one like him before. And the longer he stays, the more damage he does.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Everyone complains about public apathy. We know that democracy in Canada is in trouble. But nothing seems to change. Alex Himelfarb suggests that the reason things don't change is because we lack social trust:

By “social trust” is
meant something more than whether we trust our neighbour or others in
our community or in similar circumstance. It is rather the generalized
belief that most people in a society can be trusted, including those
quite different from ourselves.

Social trust is not
the same as political trust, but where it is high people are readier to
trust their democracy, more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to
government when something goes wrong, and less likely to see the latest
scandal as indicative of the entire class of politicians. Even when
governments perform so badly as to make political trust impossible,
where social trust is high, citizens still participate, still try to
make things better. Because they trust the future and their ability to
influence it, they are still capable of outrage rather than the
indifference or fatalism of the jaded.

Himelfarb notes that recent research indicates that social trust varies with the degree of inequality:

According to the
research, the most important factor in determining the degree of social
trust in a society seems to be its level of equality, both economic
equality and equality of opportunity. In highly unequal societies rich
and poor live such fundamentally different lives that it’s impossible to
develop the mutual empathy essential to building trust and a sense of
shared fate. When this is coupled with lack of opportunity for economic
progress we get conflict, politics as a zero-sum game and a downward
spiral of distrust. Highly unequal societies are also characterized by
widespread corruption, which undermines all manner of trust.

The countries with the highest social trust are the Scandanavian countries. These are also the countries with the highest taxes, and the most vibrant economies. How does Canada compare to them?

Over much of the post-war period, with some exceptions, most notably our
shameful treatment of Aboriginal people, Canada did pretty well in both
social trust and equality, tucked in just behind the Scandinavian
countries and Netherlands. The last couple of decades, however, have
seen a sharp decline in social trust and an accelerating increase in
income inequality, and while mobility is still pretty high it won’t stay
that way if income inequality continues to grow.

Consider what has happened during the last twenty years:

Canadians are rightly proud of our universal medicare but we are
allowing it to erode. Public funding for education is in decline so more
of the burden and related debt fall to students and their families.
Wages are under assault – witness the attacks on collective bargaining
and the abuse of the foreign workers program. Fewer than forty per cent
of unemployed Canadians have access to employment insurance. Our income
support system is fragmented and inadequate – and too often demeaning.
Huge gaps – childcare, civil legal aid, pharma- and home-care –
exacerbate inequality.

It's nothing new to say that the Harperites are leading the charge for more inequality. That's what keeps them in power.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Stephen Harper likes to say that public safety is one of his government's main priorities. After all, that's what that new tough on crime legislation and those new prisons were all about. But in the summer of 2013 -- the summer when Calgary and Toronto were flooded and downtown Lac Megantic was incinerated -- people are beginning to wonder if Harper knows what he's talking about. Phil Gibson writes:

Harper’s approach to risk management is illustrated by his laissez-faire
style of federal-provincial relations. It isn’t so much a
constitutional strategy as a deliberate process of offloading costs on
the provinces. It may be rationalized as federalism at work, but that
line of argument is really a smokescreen for deficit fighting to restore
the federal accounts in time for the next election campaign.

The prime minister’s approach to risk management moves money away from
investments in people in order to spend it on technology. This way the
private sector gets to spend it instead of other levels of government.
Another consequence has been a reduction in support
for heavy urban search and rescue teams (HUSAR) in Vancouver, Calgary,
St. Boniface, Toronto and Halifax. Meanwhile, a training center for
first responders that was run by Public Safety Canada has been shut down
and the Canadian Center for Emergency Preparedness has ceased operations, its assets transferred to a community college.

Harper's take on safety is beginning to run thin even in Alberta. Vic Toews may be gone, but he still leaves a bad smell where he has been. Brian Cornforth, president of the Alberta Fire Chiefs Association was not impressed when Toews showed up in High River:

Chief Cornforth blasted
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews for “posing” amid the flood recovery
operation in High River, saying politicians with no operational role
have no business getting in the way. The chief said he is particularly
incensed by the program cutbacks to public safety and HUSAR when he
hears about misspending in Ottawa.

The prime minister's claim to fame has been sound fiscal management. That was the spin. But, Gibson writes:

It’s hard to imagine what could upset some peoples’ faith in Harper’s
image as a fiscal manager — unless it’s their own safety. As a bedrock
value, public safety and security is as fundamental a belief as any core
value shared by the Conservatives’ base. How else to explain the
government’s fixation with retrenched changes to the criminal justice
system?

As yesterday's news about Harper's enemies list revealed, it has never been about public safety. It's always been about paranoia.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Stephen Harper shuffled his deck chairs yesterday. And Mike De Souza reports, in The National Post, that incoming ministers received a package which included a list of Harper's enemies:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office asked Conservative political
staffers to develop lists of “enemy” lobby groups, as well as
troublesome bureaucrats and reporters to avoid as part of preparations
for incoming ministers named in Monday’s cabinet shuffle, according to
leaked emails sent to Postmedia News by an unidentified source.

This isn't the firsttime the Harper government has produced an enemies list:

Harper’s government had previously distanced itself in 2012 from another
internal strategy document, released through access to information
legislation, that listed environmental and First Nations groups as
“adversaries” and the National Energy Board – an independent regulator –
as an “ally” in federal efforts to promote expansion in the oilsands
sector, the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in
Canada.

In their book,The Final Days, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported that, as Richard Nixon was losing his grip on power, he would walk the halls of the White House, semi-inebriated, holding conversations with the portraits of former presidents. Henry Kissinger is reported to have called Nixon "our drunken friend."

Monday, July 15, 2013

Perhaps it results from reading too many balance sheets. But Edward Burkhardt clearly suffers from EDD -- Emotional Deficit Disorder. The head of the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway walked into Lac Megantic last week and blamed someone else for the tragedy:

“It was our employee that was responsible for setting the brakes on the train,” Burkhardt told journalists. “That employee is under investigation and is not working.”

He also suggested that some local firefighters, who were called to put out a fire on the unmanned train, might have unwittingly tampered with the brakes.

Union Carbide blamed Indian sabotage (never proven) [for the tragedy at Bhopal] and Exxon blamed its
ship’s captain (acquitted of a drinking charge). Burkhardt implicated a
firefighter who may have “tampered” with the engine and brakes, and
within 36 hours blamed his own engineer (suspended without pay). But
Burkhardt admitted that his company had not conducted a full
investigation, and thus had little way of knowing. Public sympathy is
with the engineer.

It seems that, if you're at the top these days, you take credit for profits, but you blame someone else for the societal damage your enterprise has caused. Mr. Burkhardt may know how to read a balance sheet. Bu he hasn't got a clue when it comes to handling a crisis. Bonner writes:

One of a senior manager’s jobs is to ensure there’s a good crisis plan
and test it. Had Burkhardt done this, he could have arrived quietly in a
controlled school gym or church basement with a francophone moderator
and technical expert to brief reporters competently. He didn’t need to
look nervous, ill-informed, self-centred or combative.

Once again, the best and the brightest have proved that they are neither. They only know how to make matters worse.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

On May 2nd, the Harper government staged a ceremony to commemorate the Canadarm and Canada's contribution to space exploration. Curiously, Marc Garneau, Canada's first astronaut -- who was later made president of Canada's Space Agency, and who was the first person to operate the Canadarm -- was not invited to the event. The Canadian Press reports:

Garneau was miffed at being excluded, blaming the lapse on the "highly partisan" Conservative government.

Two
senior ministers, however, said museum and space agency staff fumbled
the ball and that their own ministerial offices played no role.

But
internal emails, guest lists and proposals show that the offices of
James Moore, Canadian Heritage minister, and Christian Paradis, industry
minister, were closely involved in the planning for more than two
months.

Numerous draft lists of potential VIP guests included at least four
former Canadian astronauts: Julie Payette, Roberta Bondar, Steve McLean
and Robert Thirsk — with Garneau's name conspicuously absent.

The
roster swelled to 62 names by the time of the event, though not all
invitees accepted. Cmdr. Chris Hadfield participated by video link from
the International Space Station.

Names were supplied by museum
officials, the Canadian Space Agency and MacDonald Dettwiler and
Associates, the firm that recently refurbished the 15-metre Canadarm,
which made its space debut in 1981.

The Canadian Press obtained
the Canadarm museum file through the Access to Information Act, though
no correspondence from the ministers' offices was included. Some key
elements of the file were also censored.

This isn't the first time the Harperites have blamed bureaucrats for their own mistakes. But what is truly disturbing is the way they lie -- they do it without blushing. Their lack of embarrassment betrays their own deep insecurity.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Goodyear, the minister
of state for science and technology, has presided over the most
retrograde federal S&T policy in memory.

During his tenure, the
government shuttered the office of the National Science Adviser,
blocked asbestos from a UN hazardous chemicals list on which it clearly
belongs, gutted the Fisheries Act, gutted the Navigable Waters
Protection Act, set out to weaken the Species at Risk Act, killed the
long-form census, eroded Environment Canada’s ability to monitor climate
change, earned an international reputation for muzzling scientists and,
at a great potential cost, defunded the world’s leading freshwater
research centre.

At the same time, changes to our science-funding regime and a makeover
of the National Research Council, Canada’s science agency, into a tool
box for industry have dented our basic-research infrastructure and
damaged our prospects for innovation.

And, like so many of Harper's ministers, Goodyear doesn't know much about his area of responsibility:

Goodyear’s training in
science is limited to a degree in chiropractics. That would be fine if
his performance in the job suggested he understood and was a champion of
the scientific enterprise.

Instead, he has
repeatedly demonstrated the opposite. He briefly made international
headlines in 2009 when he dodged a reporter’s question about whether he
puts stock in the theory of evolution, refusing to answer “a question
about my religious beliefs.” (He later clarified that he does “believe”
in the theory, but his conflation of a scientific question with a
religious one disturbed many scientists.) In any case, he has been
complicit, at least, in a dark chapter in the history of Canadian
science. And he is a symbol of the unenlightened style of government
that, more than any particular policies, Harper’s opponents seem set on
running against.

The problem, of course, is that most of Harper's caucus is as unenlightened as Goodyear. When the organization is populated by know-nothings, ignorance rules the roost.

Since the advent of Canada’s first federal Environment Minister in 1971,
there have been many bumps-on-a-log, do-nothings, and disappointments.
Many governments of the past have ignored the nation’s environmental
protection needs, resulting in years of stalled progress. But only Mr.
Kent has stepped up to the plate, Orwell-style, to re-make the Ministry
of the Environment into a green rubber stamp for destructive,
ill-considered, industrial behaviour, all while glibly blaming “foreign
interests” for meddling with Canada’s overwhelmingly foreign-owned oil
and gas sector. Only Mr. Kent has actually spearheaded the wholesale
abolition of key elements of Canada’s already threadbare federal
environmental protection architecture.

Smith then goes on to list what he believes were Kent's greatest hits (to the environment):

4.
Telling the National Round Table of the Environment and Economy (NRTEE) where it could take its advice
.

5.
Deny, deny, deny that the tar sands have any more environmental impact than your dog
.

Kent, of course, did not develop his own policy. He was merely a willing puppet:

Mr. Kent was simply the messenger for a government that is convinced,
deep in its bones, that – contrary to any evidence and common sense –
environmental protection and economic growth are incompatible.

And, for that reason, he is an embarrassment to a profession he once claimed to practice.

What is surprising is how tone deaf the prime minister is to Canadian opinion:

When “Royal” was put
back into the navy and air force names, [Peter] MacKay said it was done to
correct a “mistake,” a reference to the 1968 decision made by the
Liberal government as part of its program to unify the forces.

As Harper moves to
promote our outdated British ties with silly moves such as ridding the
army of the Maple Leaf insignia, most Canadians have long tired of
honouring the British royalty and traditions.

Many commentators have noted the prime minister's morose turn of mind. He appears to be perpetually unhappy. Perhaps the explanation is that he feels he was born too late. Harper would have been happy as a member of the Raj, or giving orders to troops during the Boer War.

Perhaps his next move will be to replace "O, Canada!" with "God Save The Queen."

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

For me, there are two quintessential American novels. Huck Finn is about the American heart. Moby Dick is about the American soul. It is perhaps no accident, then, that Chris Hedges -- whose subject is the tortured American soul -- wrote this week that,"We are all aboard the Pequod." For Hedges, if the American ship of state continues on its present course, the result will be catastrophe, not just for the nation, but for the planet:

We, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize madness. All calls for
prudence, for halting the march toward environmental catastrophe, for
sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the
flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of
glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop
failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow
slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of
limitless power, intelligence and prowess. We believe in the eternal
wellspring of material progress. We are our own idols. Nothing will halt
our voyage; it seems to us to have been decreed by natural law. “The
path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is
grooved to run,” Ahab declares. We have surrendered our lives to
corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death. Microbes will
inherit the earth.

In our decline, hatred becomes our primary lust, our highest form of
patriotism and a form of eroticism. We are made supine by hatred and
fear. We deploy vast resources to hunt down jihadists and terrorists,
real and phantom. We destroy our civil society in the name of a war on
terror. We persecute those, from Julian Assange to Bradley Manning to
Edward Snowden, who expose the dark machinations of power. We believe,
because we have externalized evil, that we can purify the earth. We are
blind to the evil within us. Melville’s description of Ahab is a
description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television
personalities and generals who through the power of propaganda fill our
heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We
are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us toward
self-annihilation.

He believes a collective madness has overtaken the country, a country which has forgotten the wisdom of its founding fathers. They knew, Hedges writes, that America's salvation lies in rebellion:

And so we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces that
will finally smite us. Those who see where we are going lack the
fortitude to rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequod’s crew.
It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us into hostages.

Huck Finn is about moral courage. Huck is prepared to go to hell for helping his friend Jim escape. Huck, Twain wrote, is a boy with "a sound heart and a deformed conscience." For Hedges, America is doomed as long as those with deformed consciences continue to captain the ship of state.

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Vic Toews resigned from the Harper cabinet -- and politics -- yesterday. His is the latest departure from Team Harper, as the prime minister tries to put a new face on his government. But, writes Michael Harris:

It won’t work. Everyone knows who pulls the strings, no matter who is
offering up the speaking points on television — and the puppet-master
himself is not popular these days.

The Harper government has always been a one man show -- and now that one man is in the doghouse. The Wright-Duffy Affair is something which Canadians instinctively understand. And they know that Mr. Harper is desperate:

The PM has been all over the map on this file. First, the
government’s line was Senator Duffy had paid back the money and was
displaying “leadership” in the expenses scandal. That Edsel didn’t get
very far down the road.

Then Harper’s robots tried the narrative that Nigel Wright gave Duffy
$90,000 because he was the soul of friendship and generosity, just
trying to help out a guy who was in over his head. Stephen Harper
endorsed that fiction by saying shortly after the story broke that
Wright had his “confidence” and would not be resigning.

Then funny things started to happen on the way to the RCMP
investigation. In the prime minister’s eyes, Senator Duffy went from
being a “leader” in the expenses scandal to being a person who had some
questions to answer. Gone from caucus.

Next, Nigel Wright was no longer Robin Hood and no longer had the
PM’s confidence. Instead, he resigned and became the man who “acted
alone” in doing the secret deal with Duffy.

Stephen Harper -- the ultimate control freak -- has lost control of the story; and, for the first time since he became prime minister, his machinations aren't working. Mr. Harper and truth have always been distant relatives. But now truth has finally caught up with the prime minister.

And, when it comes to cabinets, the truth is that all the members of the inner circle sound like Stephen Harper

Monday, July 08, 2013

In today's Toronto Star, Natalie Mehra and Michael McBane warn that the Harper government is taking aim at Medicare. For the system to work, the prime minister needs to meet with his provincial counterparts. However,

This summer’s gathering of the premiers marks the final Council of the Federation meeting before 2014, when the National Health Accord
expires. Penned in 2004, the 10-year health accord set priorities to
improve access to health care and established a new funding formula.

The meetings do not
include the federal government and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will
not be in Niagara. What many Canadians do not realize is that there are
no first ministers’ gatherings of all the premiers and the prime
minister anymore. Harper refuses to attend them.

Even more importantly, Harper has refused to talk about two cornerstones of an evolving medicare program:

In 2004 the provinces, territories and federal government established a National Pharmaceutical Strategy.
Finally, progress was promised toward a national drug coverage program
that would actually cut overall drug costs through bulk buying and
better co-ordination. But since their election, the Harper Conservative
government has refused to participate in this committee, effectively
killing the dream of national drug coverage and stalling progress on
reducing drug prices for the better part of the last decade.

In 2004, out of the
health accord discussions, the provinces and federal government also
began work to discuss home and continuing care. Progress on creating a
national home and continuing care strategy is vital for more than a
million Canadians who struggle with high out-of-pocket costs for
post-hospital care.

Harper's antipathy to public healthcare is unmistakable. Mehra and McBane write:

In fact, the federal Conservative government’s antipathy to public
medicare is becoming more and more overt. Not only has it walked away
from the table on a national drug program and home care, it has also
bluntly refused to meet with the provincial governments about renewing
the funding formula for health care. Instead, the federal government
plans to reduce funding from current projections by $36 billion in
upcoming years, reversing the gains made in the health accord. In the
latest budget, the government cut the Health Council of Canada as well as health services for veterans and refugees. The federal health minister has done nothing to implement the National Mental Health Strategy
and has taken no action to uphold single-tier medicare in the face of
private clinics extra-billing patients in provinces like British
Columbia.

Mr. Harper is a one man wrecking ball. He was absolutely serious when he declared that we wouldn't recognize Canada when he was through with it. He, quite literally, is a hazard to your health.

Sunday, July 07, 2013

In a recent article, Noam Chomsky asks the question we should all be asking: "Who will defend the earth?" The people who are desperately interested in the answer to that question are people we have traditionally thought of as "backward." But, Chomsky writes, they understand what is at stake:

That the Earth now desperately needs defense from impending
environmental catastrophe is surely obvious to any rational and literate
person. The different reactions to the crisis are a most remarkable
feature of current history.

At the forefront of the defense of nature are those often called
“primitive”: members of indigenous and tribal groups, like the First
Nations in Canada or the Aborigines in Australia - the remnants of
peoples who have survived the imperial onslaught. At the forefront of
the assault on nature are those who call themselves the most advanced
and civilized: the richest and most powerful nations.

And, the answer to that question is at the heart of the turmoil which presently roils in Turkey:

The struggle to defend the commons takes many forms. In microcosm,
it is taking place right now in Turkey’s Taksim Square, where brave men
and women are protecting one of the last remnants of the commons of
Istanbul from the wrecking ball of commercialization and gentrification
and autocratic rule that is destroying this ancient treasure.

The defenders of Taksim Square are at the forefront of a worldwide
struggle to preserve the global commons from the ravages of that same
wrecking ball - a struggle in which we must all take part, with
dedication and resolve, if there is to be any hope for decent human
survival in a world that has no borders. It is our common possession, to
defend or to destroy.

We have become obsessed with the notion of private property, while we have forgotten the concept of the public commons. And, if we refuse to accept the idea that we are all in this together, the planet will collapse. In fact, it is well on the way to collapse.

Saturday, July 06, 2013

Documents released yesterday indicate that, contrary to what Stephen Harper says, there were more people than Nigel Wright involved in the pay off to Mike Duffy. Most interesting of all is the revelation that Senator Irving Gertsein, who controls Conservative Party funds, was prepared to pony up $30,000 to help Duffy pay his bill -- until Gerstein discovered that Duffy's tab was three times bigger than that.

At the beginning of the campaign for the 2006 election, an Ottawa lawyer
named Alan Riddell stepped aside as the Conservatives’ nominated
candidate in the Ottawa South riding. The party wanted to run Alan
Cutler, a public servant who had blown the whistle on the Liberal
sponsorship scandal, in the riding. Besides, as a candidate Riddell was,
to some extent, less than ideal. He had run for the Conservatives in
2004 and lost after the Ottawa Sun ran an embarrassing story about a prank Riddell had played in his student days. (He’d dressed up as a character from Hogan’s Heroes, and I don’t mean Corporal LeBeau. A bit of a no-no, in retrospect.) After he lost the Sun
retracted much of its story, but the damage was done. So, under some
pressure from the party in 2006, Riddell dropped out, the party thanked
him for his efforts, and Cutler became the candidate.

Then a CBC reporter asked Riddell why he had pulled out of the race
so late. Riddell replied that the party made it easy by agreeing to
cover his campaign expenses. He put the cost at about $50,000. Reporters
following Harper on the campaign trail promptly asked him about the
deal with Riddell. “In fact there is no agreement and he hasn’t been
paid anything,” Harper said. When asked again later that day — it was
the end of 2005 and Harper was still the kind of guy who might deign to
scrum twice in one day — he repeated himself: “The party does not have
an agreement to pay Mr. Riddell these expenses, and Mr. Riddell has not
been paid anything to date.”

Unfortunately for Harper’s version of events, there was an email
trail, which somebody on Riddell’s campaign promptly leaked to
reporters. Riddell wound up suing the party for his expenses. On January
11, 2007, Judge Denis Power of Ontario Superior Court ruled “that Alan
M. Riddell and the Conservative Party of Canada entered into a binding
agreement on November 25, 2005.” He could hardly reach any other
conclusion. Among the evidence produced in court was a November 25 email
from Mike Donison, the Conservatives’ former director general, to
Riddell’s lawyer. The email read, in part: “There is now a binding
agreement between Mr. Riddell and the Conservative Party of Canada.”

And, of course, there was that story about Chuck Cadman -- another candidate who Harper had dumped -- who ran as an independent and was re-relected in his riding. Harper needed Cadman's vote to bring down the Martin government in 2005. The story making the rounds was that the dying Cadman was offered a large insurance policy to take care of his widow. But Cadman could not be bought.

Mr. Harper has denied any and all suggestions that he had anything to do with such nefarious schemes. The pattern is pretty clear. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Friday, July 05, 2013

Stephen Harper is about to shuffle his cabinet. And those who are presently in it -- but who will not run in the next election -- are taking their leave. Among them is Ted Menzies. Jeffrey Simpson writes:

Mr. Menzies was the last former Alberta Progressive Conservative left
in the new Conservative Party created by Stephen Harper. When Mr.
Menzies sought the nomination, he ran against a clutch of Reform Party
types who cancelled each other out and allowed him to slide to victory.
Once nominated, the election was a formality.

All the other
Alberta Conservative MPs are either from the old Reform Party or weren’t
involved in electoral politics before running for office. With his
departure, the Alberta caucus will shift just a bit further to the
right.

And, even if the players change, they will all be singing from the same hymnal:

This government’s tone and style are beginning to wear on more and more
Canadians. The ferocious partisanship, the excessive secrecy, the
negative television ads, the mendacity directed at opponents, the
overwhelming sense that enemies (including most of the media, of course)
abound, the almost manic preoccupation with spin and image and now the
little scandals from the Senate have created the impression, outside the
Conservative core, of a government that has ideology and agenda but not
much heart, empathy, feeling or understanding for anyone who doesn’t
share that ideology and agenda.

Simpson ends with a seminal question:

Ask yourself: How many senior Conservatives smile? Most are so scripted
by the Prime Minister’s Office that they dare not show whatever humour
they possess, or they turn it into sarcastic blasts at the opposition.

The Conservative Party -- like the man who heads it -- is now officially, and thoroughly, a nasty piece of work.

Thursday, July 04, 2013

In their book, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu demonstrate that, around the world, austerity has had devastating consequences on public health. Consider what economic shock therapy accomplished in the Soviet Union:

The Soviet economy collapsed in the early 1990s, erasing countless
jobs. Ironically, those still working in public health kept good records
of the disaster. Stuckler and Basu studied death certificates and
found that "The rate of death rose by a disconcerting 90 per cent among
the subgroup of men aged twenty-five to thirty-nine, in the prime of
their lives."

The statistics showed that they died, in
effect, from stress -- expressed in "alcohol poisonings, suicides,
homicides, and injuries." And heart attacks.

On the other hand, consider the case of Iceland:

Having hosted an offshore-banking industry that imploded, the country
experienced some noisy demonstrations that forced the government to
hold a referendum: Should Icelanders pay to honour the debts of their
bankers, or not?

The answer was no, much to the alarm of the
EU. But the Icelanders toughed out the recession without sacrificing
too many jobs or social support programs. Stuckler and Basu followed the
Icelandic health records: death rates kept falling, and heart-attack
rates were unchanged. So were rates of depression. People were working
and earning less, but self-reported as feeling pretty good.

Or consider what has happened in Britain:

Britain coped fairly well under Gordon Brown's Labour government in the
early years of the Great Recession, but David Cameron's Tory-LibDem
coalition has caused a public-health disaster.

The evidence -- when people pay attention to it -- is clear:

The real key to economic growth is not to cut social programs, but to
boost them. Every dollar spent on healthcare and education actually
generates three dollars in the economy. And why not? A healthy,
educated, economically secure population will ride out recessions in far
better shape than one trying to cope with joblessness, depression, and
alcohol.

In the end, Stuckler and Basu write:

Had the austerity experiments been governed by the same rigorous
standards as clinical trials, they would have been discontinued long ago
by a board of medical ethics. … Instead of austerity, we should enact
evidence-based policies to protect health during hard times. …
Ultimately austerity has failed because it is unsupported by sound logic
or data. It is an economic ideology. It stems from the belief that
small government and free markets are always better than state
intervention.

Their conclusion is worth remembering when Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty tell us that their economic program is good for what ails us.

Wednesday, July 03, 2013

The PM and his government are not good managers. The nauseating
repetition of the claim that the Tories know what they’re doing with the
country’s finances will not make it so.

They’ve pissed away more money than Madonna on a shopping spree — a
billion on the G 8-20 meetings that put a dent in the world’s Perrier
supply and little else.

They just plain lost $3.2 billion and the guy in charge over at
Treasury Board is still there, rumoured to be on his way to Finance.

They are such good fiscal managers that we now have the
highest deficit in our history. I know, I know, it’s the fault of those
damn Europeans who didn’t listen to Steve about austerity.

Nor has the man who came to Ottawa to trim big government delivered on
that commitment. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, the
Conservative government has added 34,000 jobs to the public service
between 2006 and 2012, raising the federal payroll by 14 per cent.

And, therefore, the prime minister now insists that secrecy is the order of the day:

Secrecy over budget numbers, secrecy over the sticker price for new
jets, secrecy over where cabinet meets — all secrecy, all the time. As
Jim Bronskill recently reported, the PM is now trying to enforce blanket secrecy over eleven federal agencies — retroactively and for all time.

The jig is up. The survival strategy is to hide. But it's too late for that.

Over the four years from 2007 to 2011, median income for families
grew a tepid 1.9 per cent, to $68,000 from $66,700. That’s a growth rate
of less than 0.5 per cent per year.

What it means is that consumers -- who the Royal Bank says are the "lynch pin" of the Canadian economy -- are tapped out. RBC predicts that:

Canada will see years of economic growth below the rates seen in the
U.S., as Canadian consumers start to spend more cautiously and pay down
their debt.

And government cutbacks are partially responsible for the loss of family income:

Part of what appears to be keeping Canadian incomes stagnant is
declining transfer payments from government. StatsCan’s data found that
the median amount of money transferred from the government to families
-- things such as the child tax benefit, unemployment insurance, or
welfare -- fell to $6,000 in 2011 from $6,700 in 2010.

Seniors saw their median government payments drop by $600 over the year.

The reason the United States went into deep recession in 2008 was that wealth was sucked to the top of the economic pyramid, while wealth at the much wider bottom of the pyramid dried up. Canada appears to be headed down the same path.

Monday, July 01, 2013

It's traditional to look back at our history on Canada Day. And on this Canada Day -- our 146th -- the Harper government has decided to review whether we teach our history the "right" way. Specifically, it feels that not enough emphasis is placed on our military prowess. Tom Walkom writes, in The Toronto Star, that Canada Day is a day for nationalism, not jingoism. The government is correct, he says, when it claims that Canadian citizenship has been devalued:

Where the Conservative
government is off base, however, is in its attempts to refocus history
solely on Canada’s military successes in war.

War is not
unimportant. Canadians have fought in many — from early conflicts that
pitted aboriginal nations against one another to Afghanistan and Libya.

But not everything is
war. And not all wars in which Canadians took part were necessarily
virtuous. To think otherwise is to veer into jingoism, where our team is
always right simply because it is our team and the other guys (whoever
they are) are always scumbags.

And, so, the Harperites spent a lot of money trying to convince Canadians that the War of 1812 was a glorious example of Canadians standing on guard for thee. The problem with that thesis is that war is never glorious.

My father was a World War II vet. Before the days of satellites, he was trained as an aerial photographer, tasked with the job of photographing potential bombing targets. But, when he finished his training, he was given command of an anti-aircraft battery. Thus, he spent most of the war shooting at targets, rather than photographing them -- and, in the process -- becoming one himself. He survived and came home, he said, because of pure dumb luck. Most of those he trained with never came home. My mother's first husband died in Europe and, like my father's fellow trainees, never came home.

The Harperite taste for militarism is the dream of adolescents who have never been tested in the crucible of war. One suspects they couldn't survive boot camp. Canada has always been the impossible country -- a huge land mass with a sparse population, whose constituent parts have managed to survive for 146 years. One hopes the country will survive the Harperites.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.